Lyceum

Alfred Frankowski

Southern Illinois University

Spectacle Terror Lynching, Public Sovereignty, 

and the Architecture of Lived Racial Violence

Friday, September 21, 2018

at 5:00 pm,

COE, Room 164

This paper starts by considering the fact of American Spectacle Lynching as a type of
architecturally lived structure in the past and in the present. The history of lynching is
thought to have had its most extreme effects on black men by erasing them through brutal
public murder. This history itself seems to have undergone its own erasure. This paper
problematizes and complicates the notion that anti-black violence in general and lynching
violence in particular is linked to spatial invisibility or amnesia. Rather what is erased is
both the question of public sovereignty and spaces in which this sovereignty is also
representative of the embedded violence that structures the political lifeworld, both past
and present.
Alfred Frankowski is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale. His research focuses on 19th and 20thCentury Continental
Philosophy, Aesthetics, Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonialism and Genocide Studies. He
is author of The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Philosophy of
Mourning (2015) and co-editor of Rethinking Genocide in Africa and the African

Diaspora (forthcoming, 2019). His current projects concern decolonial aesthetics, anti-
black colonialism, genocide and the African Diaspora, necropolitics, and the architectural history of lynching.